French artist Geoffroy Pithon is in the middle of explaining how he doesn’t see painting as something sacred when I realize he has just walked across the painting spread out across his studio floor. “As long as the work hasn’t left the studio, anything can happen,” he said. When I visited his studio in Nantes, France, he was hardly trying to follow the perimeter around the abstract work on the ground. Instead, he crossed right through the heart of it in his weathered sneakers and invited me to do the same.
Pithon, who is represented by MAĀT Gallery in Paris, entered the art world through the side door. Now 37, he only established himself as an artist in 2021; before that, he worked as a graphic designer. His painting practice is entirely self-taught, an advancement in a career born out of experimentation and happenstance. He just unveiled the show “Botanique Murmure” at MAĀT Gallery, featuring a collection of watercolors inspired by photographs he took of gardens, that will run through November 11th. He also has an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chengdu, China, which will open on November 6th, marking his first solo museum show.
Pithon’s practice is not grounded in either painting or graphic design but rather what he calls “graphic experiments.” These are large-scale, saturated abstract works on reams of blue-back paper that he glues together and covers with geometric shapes in his masterful color palette. “Paper is one of the tools of a graphic designer. Since I hadn’t learned academic painting on canvas with oils, I painted on what I knew, which was paper,” Pithon said.
He identifies more with the term “artist” than with “painter,” he said. “And from time to time, from this movement, which is like a continuous intellectual windmill, things escape.” By “things,” he means gallery exhibitions, site-specific projects for public art centers, sets for theater productions, collaborations with brands, or commissions for videos. He lights up with infectious exhilaration when discussing the boundlessness of his practice, like a pioneer invigorated by the open promise of the Wild West. He is most interested in the genre-defying work of creatives who move seamlessly across disciplines, like Nathalie Du Pasquier, Oskar Schlemmer, or Pablo Picasso.
Pithon was raised in Angers, France, a provincial town in the Loire Valley, by a doctor and an astrologer in a scientifically minded family. Music was, and remains, a seminal influence in life and artistic practice. He found a foothold in creative expression and visual culture by way of the 2000s punk and hardcore scene. He also played in bands himself. “It was my first connection to visual artistic culture and is what made me want to pursue design, because when you’re in a band, you’re making the album cover and the flyers for the shows, and without realizing it, you’re doing a bit of art direction and graphic design.”
While studying graphic design at the prestigious École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, where he graduated in 2012, he began making posters with a design collective called Formes Vives. The trio became known for their cut-paper forms, bold blocks of flat color, and hand-drawn typography. Over time, Pithon began experimenting with enhancing the posters by painting on them with ink.
Pithon realized that a fire was burning inside of him to turn his practice towards something more artistic in nature, and so he taught himself to paint by studying videos of Willem de Kooning and Cy Twombly.
Following an artist residency in eastern France, he had his first exhibition in a group show in 2019. A combination of site-specific public installations at spaces across Belgium and France followed, including “Cabine,” his first solo exhibition, held at L’Espale, Scène nationale du Mans in 2021. This show would go on to define his practice: He introduced a spatial, experiential component where his large-scale paintings hung like wallpaper panels from the ceiling to cover the walls and the floor, creating a booth-like immersive world.
Today, he calls that exhibition his manifesto. “I want my paintings to be an act, not an image; images are difficult to inhabit. I want to allow viewers to connect with recollections, memories, and sensations, for the work to invite wonder in a visual sense, but also a physiological one.”
Soon, Pithon was tapped by Hermès to create a series of event installations. Since then, he’s worked on a larger scale with brands including Sézane and Atelier de Cologne. He views his commercial work on equal footing as the artwork he produces for MAĀT Gallery. “The question I always ask myself before accepting a project is: Will it feed my practice, advance my research? Will I be able to learn things, or try something new?”
Pithon, now, is always experimenting, whether tinkering with a work digitally, mocking up an installation, scanning a painting, or reworking a piece. He rarely begins with a blank page; sometimes the works begin with digital prints of rough sketches he produces on the computer, or hand-drawn pencil lines for guidance, and other times he searches the large-format works leftover from site-specific installations for “the most efficient parts,” which he then cuts out and reworks. He compares this process to sampling with music, “only instead of sampling from another artist, I am sampling from my own work,” he said.
Kaleidoscopic hues, which he picked up from a silkscreen design course at university, are particularly central to his practice. He likened that moment to Dylan going electric, a course-changing moment for his practice.
He has, at times, experimented with reduced palettes as a means of challenging himself, like with his series “Carmina Paginata,” which only employed red hues. He’s also in the process of moving to a new studio in Nantes, a city he prefers over Paris due to its proximity to nature and separation from the froth of the art world. There, he can keep his head down and stay focused on the work without worrying about any sort of competition. For Geoffroy Pithon, there is no competition. He lives in his own lane, in constant orbit and in pursuit of reaching new frontiers with his work, be it new mediums, new materials, or new scales. He isn’t following in anyone’s footsteps, but rather charting his own path.
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Video by Pushpin Films / Thibault Royer for Artsy.
Thumbnail: Portrait of Geoffroy Pithon by Thibault Royer for Artsy, 2025; Geoffroy Pithon, from left to right: “Botanique Murmure 24,” 2025, and “Botanique Murmure 28,” 2025. Courtesy of the artist and MAĀT Gallery.
Correction: A previous version of this article included an incorrect title for Geoffroy Pithon’s exhibition at MAĀT Gallery. It is “Botanique Murmure,” not “Boutique Murmure.”
